Ministry of Intrigue

On recommendation of far too many people to mention, I’m checking out Google Reader again.

I remember peeking at it when it was first released, when I was stubbornly intent on sticking with browser/desktop based reader, and I remember being less than impressed. In typical Google fashion the initial interface was so sparse and ultimately gave me the initial impression of it being a fairly weak client. In fact, I was so turned off by it, that I never gave it a chance beyond feeding it a few test subscriptions before going back to using Sage.

Ultimately, it would be Bloglines that converted me to web-based feed reading. I fell in love with its simple interface and powerful key commands, as well as the convenience of accessing my feeds everywhere. As I began to imbibe more and more of the Web 2.0 kool-aid, I began to manage more and more of my life on the web. I’ve been using Bloglines for at least nine months now, and I’ve been quite happy with it. The Bloglines notifier held a place of honor in my Firefox status bar, right next to theGmail manager extension.

Now, when I started hearing people recommending Google Reader to me again, I was suspicious that the Google fanboy virus was to blame. However, upon reflecting on the wonder that is Gmail, not to mention Google Calendar and the fantastic overhaul of Google Groups I decided that I’d give Reader another try.

All I have to say is, “Wow.” I’m really impressed with the new interface, it seems to blend the best features of Bloglines, Gmail and more tag-based service like Rojo. The key-commands are similar to Gmail, and uses tags/labels just like Gmail as well. The interface is really nice and I find the interface far more visually pleasing than Bloglines, and not nearly as cluttered as Rojo. I like that when I start reading a feed that items are marked as read when I scroll past them, as opposed to Bloglines which marks every item as read as soon as I open the feed. Also, while I don’t make use of this feature as much, I really like the way Google integrates their feed sharing features into the service. Every feed has the option to be shared, as does each feed item, and each feed item can be emailed with a single click. Very slick.

Those sharing features are also available in Bloglines, but they seem more prominent in Google Reader. On the whole, GR seems more polished, although I do enjoy the simplicity of Bloglines. It remains to be seen if I’m going to switch for good, but I think I’ll run them both parallel for a while and let you all know about the experience.

Incidentally, if you want to try out Google Reader, I’d recommend checking out the Google Reader Notifier extension for Firefox, by Mark D.B.D. It rocks.

Found this via Dvorak’s blog:

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland   “You have a Midland accent” is just another way of saying “you don’t have an accent.” You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The South
The West
The Northeast
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Next up: two book reviews.

I was just perusing some of my Statcounter data when I came across this search string a Canadian used to find my site. It’s far from the most bizarre thing I’ve seen in my search results, but it is notable for its specificity.

The search finds my site due to a humorous comment a reader left on the indicated post. I’m curious though, if you run a website and check your statistics, what is the strangest search term someone has used to find your site?

This is kind of an old game, but if you ever find yourself bored try playing a game of Yeti Pingu-Throw. It’s an addictive little game in which you play a yeti, who repeatedly bats a penguin off into the horizon to see how far you can get the little critter’s head to fly. You can increase the distance by trying to bounce the penguin’s head off of land mines.

I was turned onto this game by Chris, and it is really addictive in a silly way. The highest score I’ve managed to get is 1179.5, and hopefully I can be content with that because I am wasting way too much time fiddling with this damn game.

What’s your best score?

P.S. As a Linux user, I do feel somewhat guilty for engaging in the virtual abuse of penguins, so I like to think of them as penguin defectors.

How many times have you googled yourself? Too embarrassed to say? Same here.

I suppose just about everyone with a connection to the Internet has been guilty of a little ego-surfing once in a while. Over the course of your searching, more than likely you have found sites that either contain somewhat embarrassing information about yourself, falsehoods, or contain a ton of information about someone else who shares the same name as you. The latter is not as common in my case, although you would be surprised at the number of Andrliks out there. Besides the obvious fun that can be had at your expense by your friends looking at the search results for your name and say, donkeys, what’s the big deal?

Well for starters, more and more employers are using the almighty search powers of Google during the application review process. Also, more and more well-connected folks will spend some time doing searches on their prospective dates, just to verify that they didn’t just agree to a dinner with a potential psycho. Perhaps that online racist blogger or recently convicted sex offender that shares your name would be a bad page for them to find and associate with you. Or any number of other unfortunate number of sites they could mistake as related to you. You obviously cannot stop search engines from bringing up that data, or even people from impersonating you online, so how do you minimize the damage?

This is where claimID comes in. claimID is a service that allows you to claim the pages links that actually are related to you and contextualize them. Essentially, you post to your account (usually via a convenient bookmarklet) any pages you find that actually refer to you and categorize them in order to create a “resume” of links representing your online identity. You can specify whether the information on the site is written by you or someone else, whether it is about you or something else that you were connected to, or define your own custom relationship either in plain text or using the rel tag, just like in the XFN. You can also enter the year the page was written or at the events it refers to occurred, as well as a full text description if you feel so inclined.

For example:

This is the web-based database application I designed at my last consulting job.

Or:

Yes, this is a picture of me in full goth regalia, but I was only 17 at the time and going through a phase.

Another option is to create a category for links that are definitely not you, such as the more horrific possibilities suggested above, or if there is someone actively impersonating you online, like the moron posing as Leo Laporte on MySpace even though he was outed several months ago on This Week In Tech.

Admittedly, someone like myself could just create and maintain a page like that on my own site, but not everyone has their own domain, even though they might have a significant presence online via social networking sites like MySpace, LiveJournal, Last.fm, or other sites. For those types of users, a service like claimID can be invaluable as a resource, as our digital and analog lives continue to converge. In fact, I would argue that this type of service has a great deal of value for those of us who do have our own sites, as claimID provides a way to standardize the data. Just include a link on your site, homepage in another networking site, or even on your resume to your claimID user page in order to provide readers with a sort of executive summary of your online identity. Also, by linking to your user page, and by using your legal name for your claimID username you will increase the search rankings of your “link resume” which helps get people to your page faster.

The service is in closed beta right now while they test their ability to scale, but you can request an invitation be sent to you in order to be placed on the waiting list. While the developers pledge that their will always be a free account option, upon the full release upgraded accounts will be available for $5 a year. Currently it is not clear what the difference between the two accounts will be, however users who participate in the beta test will receive a free upgraded membership as a thank you for their help in feedback, which is nice.

The service supports the now standard Web 2.0 fare, including tagging of entries and RSS syndication for your links page. In addition it also automatically calculates and supports MicroIDs, which is a standards-based identifier whose age is measured in months. Keeping up with the buzz, the site was developed in about five months using Ruby on Rails, the new development framework that is causing much hoopla in programming circles.

Okay, I’ve talked about a lot of the good things, but there are some inherent problems at this stage. To begin with, and this is the big question, is any of this any use without identity verification? The developers state in their FAQ that they do not intend the service to validate identity, but rather to be part of the network of your online identity, a “web of trust” if you will, that will validate itself by context. It isn’t meant to be definitive, with the exception of when you personally provide the address to your link page, but rather a stop along the way during a reader’s search. This calls into question the effectiveness of authoritatively claiming your links, unless you link to it directly from your own clearly validated domain. The support of microformats helps in this regard, but MicroIDs, while opaque, are transmitted as a meta tag in your page header, which means that they can be spoofed, so while they help you assert your identity, they don’t necessary prevent any impersonation. Whether the combination of referrals and MicroIDs will ultimately provide a satisfactory method of personal validation will only be answered as we see the service in practice. I see great potential for malicious spammers here if the claimID folks are not exceptionally diligent.

In addition, some of the features seem to be unnecessary. For example, I’m not sure why anyone would want to use RSS syndication for their links, unless they felt like stalking another claimID user. That being said, I felt much the same way about del.icio.us feeds until I underwent my true social networking conversion a few months ago. Now I track several del.icio.us feeds along with all my blog subscriptions.

Tagging is another example of a feature I’m not sure about here. If the user is already being expected to group their links into categories, why add the additional complication of assigning tags to the entries? Possibly this is linked with a future feature to come, but it seems like Web 2.0 overkill. I know users have grown accustomed to having this feature, but is it really useful? How many links will the average user actually accumulate? Online celebrities could definitely have use for this additional layer of specification, and perhaps as more and more of our lives move onto the Internet this will become a really useful feature for everyone. Maybe this is a really forward-thinking addition to the service, but only time will tell.

Regardless, I see a lot of potential in this service, and I will be very interested to see how it develops.

claimID Site

My claimID Page

Inside The Net Interview with the developers, which contains a no-invitation registration link to get an instant account.

Today, I finally got my Google Analytics invite. I can’t remember when I first applied for it, but it must have been several months ago.

I have heard tales on the web that GA is slow and can bog down page loading, but I haven’t noticed any difference since I added the code to my template. Let me know if things start to hang.

I won’t start seeing reports off of the gathered data for about 24 hours, so I cannot speak to the quality of the service yet. The documentation indicates that reports will generally only update every 24 hours, so I will be curious if the supposed depth of information Google promises will be able to compete with the speed of my beloved Statcounter. Although I will say that the GA interface totally kicks Statcounter’s ass, so my hopes are high.

I will have a full review for you all in a couple weeks after I have played around with the service a bit.

Google Calendar was released today.

Full review to follow.

UPDATE: Review will be posted next week. I’ve got a lot to say about it, but I want to spend a few more days trying it out before I commit my thoughts to non-paper.

I cannot remember how I initially heard about Krugle, but I’m glad that I did.

For those of you who haven’t heard of this service (which may be many of you), Krugle is a service that aims to be the search engine for developers, and it appears to be well on its way. Now, before you blow this off as yet another search company just waiting to be crushed by Google or Yahoo!, let me assure you that this particular service is very different. What’s the difference, you ask? Why should developers care about another search engine?

Simple: Krugle doesn’t index web pages; it indexes source code.

Open source code, naturally. Krugle’s search engine crawls through online directories such as Sourceforge, Apache.org and many others gathering data on the countless numbers of open source projects held in those repositories. User can then search either by project content, or within the source code itself for particular tokens. As OSS continues to play an increasingly important influence in the world of software development, Krugle gives programmers a greater ability to take advantage of it. On their about page, the company explains the reasoning behind the product:

While the development world has changed, the tools that developers use haven’t kept up. Developers spend from 20-25 percent of their time looking for code and code related information: a frustrating situation for programmers, and an expensive problem for companies.

Current search engines are okay for finding web pages, but they don’t crawl or find source code, whether in open repositories or within source code control systems (SCCS). They also don’t leverage the inherent structure of code to support the types of searches programmers need.

I certainly haven’t done any surveys to verify their assertion regarding the amount of time developers spend searching through code, but I can say from my personal experience and from anecdotal evidence that their estimate is pretty close to the mark. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been writing code and thought to myself, “You know, this thing I’m making is starting to look suspiciously like a wheel…” You can imagine my excitement when I found out about this site.

At the time I discovered it, the product was in late alpha testing and was not available to the public. So I signed up for the waiting list and anxiously waited to hear about the release. Apparently so did 40,000 other people.

As they are swamped with tester requests, Krugle has been slowly giving people access as beta testers in increments of a 1000 users at a time as they open the system to their waiting list. I just got my access last night.

Krugle has a really impressive interface, heavily inspired by Web 2.0 technologies, especially AJAX. Rather than using links to open multiple browser windows, or send you on a goose chase, each search you perform is placed in dynamically generated tabs, with snippets of the code underneath the link heading. You can search by content, source code, code language or all three. When you click on a search result, another tab is generated displaying the entirety of the referenced files source code, complete with syntax highlighting. On the right of your screen, you are also provided with an outline view of the file’s originating project, which allows you to see how the file you are viewing relates in its project hierarchy. You can then click any other file in that outline to view it in a separate tab. The outline pane can also show you a tree view of which repository it is coming from.



If you note the bottom of the page, you will see there are controls for creating personal Krugle bookmarks, tags and annotations to files that you can keep to yourself or share with other Krugle users. :)

Do I have any complaints? Just one tiny little thing. As this is a new technology, programmers haven’t necessarily always put their licensing information in the file that Krugle will point you to. I really wish Krugle would also index the software license at the project level and then display that prominently in the search results so that no one can miss them. While we’re at it, why not include the software licenses as a searchable field?

All in all though, this is a great service and I’m excited that it has arrived.

It is with some trepidation that I set out to review the developer preview of the Flock browser. It hardly seems fair, does it? After all, the public beta isn’t scheduled to come out for another month. What kind of jerk reviews software that hasn’t even been released yet?

This jerk, apparently.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, Flock is a new open source browser (currently only available as a developer preview) based off of the Mozilla code base, particularly code from Firefox. In fact, with an online converter utility, most Firefox extensions will work on this browser, although there are also quite a few that just will not work due to the fundamental differences between the two programs.

Flock aims to be the Web 2.0 browser, and as such comes with full integration with social web services like Flickr (photo sharing), del.icio.us and Shadows (social bookmarking). It also has Technorati support and a blogging tool that interfaces with Blogger, Typepad or Wordpress blogs. The browser itself resembles a pleasingly themed Firefox, with the the aforementioned tools nicely integrated into the interface. There is a lot to cover here, so I might as well break it down into categories.

Photo Sharing

Flock has Flickr support built right into it, which you access at any time via the topbar. With the photo uploader you can drag and drop files from your computer into the browser, and tag it as you choose before uploading.

You can also use the topbar to search through your photos or others, either by tag search or user name. I actually don’t do much photo-sharing and only reason I created a Flickr account was to test this feature out. I don’t take many photos and don’t spend much time looking at them. Leading me to your Flickr stream is a sure way to bore me to tears. However, this type of service has become insanely popular, and I think that this feature will be a big draw among those users.

Social Bookmarks

Flock supports both del.icio.us and Shadows, both very popular social bookmarking services. For those of you unfamiliar with this concept, social bookmarking is a way for you to store your bookmarks online, which makes them accessible from anywhere and allows you to share them with other people. You can tag your bookmarks in order to create on-the-fly categories for your pages making it easier for you to search. In the anarchy of self-created tags a strange cloud of data begins to form that allow you (as well as other users) to find data you might have missed by performing searches on those tags. del.icio.us is by far the more well known of the two services, although Shadows has the added benefit of allowing you to choose whether or not to share particular bookmarks. Flock can connect with either service, although it is designed to only be set to one. You can switch back and forth but as Flock moves your bookmarks back and forth I have heard this can cause unpredictable results, such as sharing your private Shadow pages publicly on del.icio.us.

I had never used these services previously as it always struck me as a waste of time to constantly be visiting some other website to store my bookmarks or blog subscriptions. Yeah, it is cool to share and the search offers a lot of possibilites, but I want it in my client. Which brings us right back to Flock.

These services are seamlessly integrated into Flock’s bookmarking system. When you want to add a page to your favorites, you click the star button (which you can see in the above photo nestled against the address bar), and you immediately have the option to tag and share the page, enter a comment, add it to one of your aggregated collections or all of the above.

Flock really gets this right. If these services are to be at all practical, they need to be part of the bookmarking process, not an extra step. I accumulated quite a few links online just as I sorted things because it was so easy. Now that I have started, I actually really like those services. I do have mild concerns about privacy, as I have visions of inexperienced users sharing much more than they intended or ever want to, however as this is geared towards the Web 2.0 consumer base, this may be an unfounded concern.

Favorites Manager

Since I’m talking about bookmarks I should mention the Favorites Manager. This is one area where Flock has really irritated me. The favorites manager builds an entire library of all your bookmarks which you can then search through, which works with the whole “search - don’t sort” philosophy, but in the end it just frustrated me. Essentially, if you want to access one of your favorites, you have to open the Favorites Manager and search through the library for page you are looking for. You can access favorites via the topbar, but you need to add it to one of your aggregated collections which you can then assign at will to the topbar. The library itself drove me up the wall. Eventually, I tried to put my favorites into categorized collections, which made it a little easier, but if you have too many favorites in a particular collection, they go off the side of the browser and you have to click an expand button to get to those other links, and occasionally the name of that page is replaced with the feed protocol of that page making it impossible to tell where it links to.

As much fun as it is to switch the topbar around on a whim, it gets irritating pretty fast, and I really hope they address this issue before the public release because I certainly don’t want to have to come up with thirty or so collections to hold all my links in a manageable form.

The other thing is that (just like with tags) an individual bookmark can belong to multiple collections, which actually sounds like a really good idea, but since the collections are what users populate the topbar with, it means even less space for your bookmarks. While the basic premise seems to fit nicely with the Web 2.0 tagging concept, it really just complicates the client application.

I’ve also noticed that occasionally links in my Favorites Manager and topbar will cease to work until I restart Flock. I attribute this to it being a developer preview, however, and I’m sure it will be fixed by the public beta in May.

RSS

Flock recognizes and will correctly interpret a link using the feed tag (e.g. feed:http://blog.andrlik.org/feed/) which is something that is a welcome sight. In fact, if you star a page that has a feed associated with it, the feed will be added to your favorites as well, which is pretty sweet. However, as an RSS reader, Flock just doesn’t work right now. For starters, there is no notification system, so the only way to know if there is new content is to manually check them by going into the Favorites Manager and opening the feed, which will be displayed in a very pretty digest view. However, if I’m clicking multiple feeds just to find out if there is something new, it really isn’t syndication anymore. I might as well just go to the site. If I don’t want to go to each feed individually, Flock can take an entire collection and aggregate all of the feeds within it into one digest view very similar to what Bloglines does, which is very nice, but still short of actual notification of new content.

In addition, the updating of feeds is exceptionally buggy. I would find updates on sites hours before it showed up in my Flock feeds, even after I manually refreshed them.

From what I’ve been able to gather, this is a development priority for the folks at Flock, and if it isn’t it needs to be. You can’t spell Web 2.0 without RSS… or something like that.

Blogging

This is actually the feature that drew me to checking out Flock, as I had heard quite a bit about the integrated blogging features. One really slick little feature is the Shelf. The Shelf is yet another topbar where you can add notes or drag links into in order to remember and use for a blog entry later.

This is a rather neat idea and it is very smoothly integrated into the interface. Then again, while it is certainly visually appealing, I’m not sure I like it as much as the Scrapbook extension for Firefox, which will take notes, capture pages, and then allow you to highlight lines or annotate those pages for your reference later. It’s definitely a nice feature to have native to the browser though.

The blog editor itself is a bit of a disappointment. For a browser so geared towards blogging, it was disappointing to see that the blog editor did not support trackbacks, which I really feel is a must for any serious blogger. The WYSIWYG editor was okay, although sometimes it would generate odd HTML which would look strange in my posts. This isn’t really a large problem because I prefer to compose my entries in source view anyway, but the lack of trackbacks and the fact that it sorts Wordpress categories based on their database id number rather than in alphabetical order was a little irritating. Also, I don’t like the fact that the category selector is a multiple-select box, which requires a lot of Ctrl-clicking. I really prefer the way Performancing for Firefox works, using checkboxes for category selection (like it is natively in Wordpress). Performancing also does trackbacks, sorts categories alphabetically, uploads images via FTP and even lets me view my Metrics stats.

Another thing that bothers me about the Flock blogging tool is that when you save drafts, they are stored inside of your Flock profile on your local hard drive. This seems a little strange to me, as every blog server application I am aware of supports draft posts. It would seem to make more sense that when you click the save button that it would be published as a draft (like PFF does it), that way you can pick it up again whenever you want from any computer. The other problem with this approach is that if you delete or edit posts via another computer or application, Flock still uses its original saved copy in the profile, which means that unless you only blog or administer your blog from Flock, things can get a little ugly.

Flock has made a smart move and incorporated spell-check into the browser itself, utilizing the Spellbound extension for Mozilla and Firefox. This is a very nice feature which I believe is also planned for Firefox 2.0 as well. However, Flock doesn’t have a way to activate Spellbound’s spell-check while you type feature, which I love using in Firefox. Since it is compiled into the browser as opposed to being an extension, the user doesn’t have access to activate that feature if it even exists in their version. I did check about:config and was unable to find a setting to activate it, so I suspect it just is not available in Flock.

Unfortunately, Flock also has a problem with interface responsiveness at times (see the bit about the randomly crippled favorites above), which means that text inputed from the keyboard doesn’t always show up immediately on the screen and is sometimes misinterpreted causing quite a bit of frustration when writing a post or email via the browser. I have no idea if this is a common experience for Flock users during this developer preview or not, but it only seems to occur when I am using Flock.

Progress

I did download one of the nightly test builds to see if any of these bugs or issues have been addressed and they seem to be just as prevalent. Hopefully, they will be resolved by the May release.

Controversy

It is worth mentioning that there has been some friction in the community of Mozilla users (although from what I have heard the Firefox and Flock teams are very supportive of each other) regarding Flock’s existence. It seems that there are a lot of people who feel that the Flock project should have been limited to developing extensions for Firefox, rather than building an entirely new browser separate from Mozilla and earning their own search revenue. There has been a lot of name-calling and accusations of “ripping off” Firefox. This seems absurd to me.

The point of open-source is that the code is free to be used and modified within the confines of its license, which allows for greater innovation and allows new products to be developed in a community of cooperation in order to meet user needs. Flock is a new browser, yes. However, it is a browser that is targeted to a very specific market of Internet users, whereas Firefox is designed for general purpose use. Flock is a browser designed to meet the needs of bloggers right out of the box with no additional extensions; Firefox is set up to be a slick no-frills browser that is infinitely extensible. While I will agree that the Flock team’s claim that Flock is not a fork of the Mozilla code is somewhat ridiculous, I also think it is silly that people are upset about its creation. It’s called innovation, folks.

A Conclusion of Sorts

Flock is a browser with a lot of promise, and I really like where it is going. That being said, this preview is pretty buggy, and the features that were most important to me were disappointing (blogging) or in some cases crippled (RSS). At this point I think I get much more value and enjoyment out of my Firefox extensions, and they work a lot better for blogging. The only thing I really wish is that Firefox integrated their bookmark system with web services as it is in Flock. Although, maybe that code will find its way into a future version of Firefox. After all, that’s the beauty of open source.

I’ll be watching closely as Flock develops and I look forward to checking it out again once it gets closer to being a finished product. For now, though, I think I’ll stick with Firefox.

Tried the Flock browser? Agree/Disagree? Think I’m full of it? Leave a comment!

Via Digg:

This is a great little April Fool’s joke I found via Digg. The page explains how the RIAA and MPAA are going to merge and form a new conglomerate called MAFIAA.

It makes me smile.

UPDATE: I simply had to add a link to Google’s April Fool’s gag: Google Romance. :D